Intel Clover Trail Atom Z2760 Tablet Performance Preview

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Introduction and Samsung's ATIV

When you consider Intel's competitive position in the desktop and notebook PC markets, one simple word comes to mind, "dominance." Conversely, when it comes to tablets and smartphones, the landscape couldn't be more different. Intel's chief competitor on the desktop and PC side of the equation is AMD and it's obvious Intel is killing it there.

Intel's nemesis in tablets and smartphones? ARM, and ARM is killing it. NVIDIA, Apple, Samsung, Motorola, Google, Lenovo, Toshiba are all building devices or silicon based on ARM technology and the list goes on... and on. Recently, AMD even stepped up to the plate with ARM and rumors are that Apple is looking to possibly differentiate their Mac line-up with non-X86 architectures. Talk about exciting times for big tech. Microsoft also saw the writing on the wall and hedged a bet on ARM along with their age old WinTel design effort. Interesting times indeed. But I digress...

Windows RT, also known as Windows 8 for ARM devices, launched a couple weeks ago. Today, we have the very first Intel-driven Windows 8 tablet device to hit our labs, powered by Intel's latest low power Clover Trail Atom Z2760 SoC (System on Chip). The Atom Z2760 is a new dual core chip from Intel with integrated engines for graphics, HD video encode and decode and a low power DDR2 RAM controller. Clover Trail, like Medfield for smartphones, marks Intel's latest effort to break into the exploding tablet market. With Windows 8 finally launched, does Intel's latest Atom architecture have what it takes to compete and offer consumers a full X86 compatible solution to complement existing desktop and notebook devices?

The Samsung ATIV Smart PC 500T is a rather large, 11.6-inch tablet with a 16:9 aspect ratio for its display (1366X768 native res). This makes it feel and look very "wide" in the hand. This is a good thing for media consumption but you may find it a little too big, depending on your personal preference. MSRP with a companion keyboard dock will by around $750 for the device, $650 for just the tablet and charger accessories.We're going to leave a deep-dive into the Samsung tablet for our full review. Here, we'd like to explore a preliminary view of performance with the first Intel Clover Trail-powered Windows 8 Pro tablet we've gotten our hands on. Let's run down some quick specifics on Clover Trail and then get right down to business.

Intel® Burst Technology – Enables the processor to dynamically burst to higher performance, making it possible to provide on-demand, higher performance in small device form factors.

Intel Hyper-Threading Technology – Intel Hyper-Threading Technology provides performance and support for multi-threaded applications, helping to deliver increased performance and system responsiveness in today's multitasking environments by enabling the processor to execute two instruction threads in parallel.

Thermal images are of Clover Trail, Intel's 32nm SoC in active and standby states

The key take-aways here are that Clover Trail is built on Intel's 32nm process node. The Atom Z2760 SoC is a highly integrated chip with 2D/3D graphics, a dedicated HD video encode/decode engine, dedicated IP sec engine, image signal processor, an audio engine and display control logic. Considering the real estate that graphics, video and display consume on die, it's clear how important the visual experience is for the platform the chip is targeted to.

Also, recall that Intel licensed a PowerVR SGX545 graphics core in Clover Trail as they did with Medfield for smartphones, although the graphics engine is still noted as "Integrated Intel HD Graphics." The SGX545 is one of the fastest integrated graphics cores on the market currently for tablets and smartphones, though it's out-classed by the SGX544 in Apple's A6X SoC and the newest iPad.

Power consumption and the aggressive power gating on chip for Clover Trail is impressive with a 1.7 Watt total TDP (Thermal Design Power). Above, Intel shows thermal imaging of active and standby states in various blocks of Clover Trail. In short, when idle or under-utilized, blocks are completely shut down.

What's a little surprising is that Clover Trail only supports low power DDR2 system memory instead of including support for DDR3. The USB and other general-purpose I/O is driven by eMMC technology. eMMC or Embedded Multimedia Card is essentially a variant of Flash SD Card technology, which has actually superseded it. Most tablet designs (NVIDIA's Tegra 3 for example) currently employ eMMC but it would seem that the opportunity for a faster mSATA interface solution could have been considered, though time to market and other trade-offs are always at play in the semiconductor market. Regardless, how this all translates to available system bandwidth and performance is something we'll explore next.